Blog – Matthew Tellerhttps://www.matthewteller.com
Writer, journalist & documentary-makerThu, 01 Feb 2018 14:37:42 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4QuiteAlonehttps://feedburner.google.comQatar’s Digital Libraryhttps://www.matthewteller.com/2018/01/31/qatars-digital-library/
https://www.matthewteller.com/2018/01/31/qatars-digital-library/#respondWed, 31 Jan 2018 15:24:32 +0000https://www.matthewteller.com/?p=2042Sometimes, things just don’t work out. This is a story on the then-new Qatar Digital Library that I researched in 2014 and 2015, and wrote in 2016. Shortly after I’d filed, the editor who commissioned it apologised and said things had changed: he could no longer publish it. That happens. What hardly ever happens, though, is...

This is a story on the then-new Qatar Digital Library that I researched in 2014 and 2015, and wrote in 2016. Shortly after I’d filed, the editor who commissioned it apologised and said things had changed: he could no longer publish it.

That happens.

What hardly ever happens, though, is what he did next. He paid me in full.

Usually, in these situations, you get a ‘kill fee’, a proportion of the agreed fee to ‘kill’ (or ‘spike’) the story – that is, abandon it. Sometimes, people try to get away with a 10% kill fee. I’ve had 50% kill fees.

In this case, I’m very lucky to have a long-standing relationship with a relatively well-resourced editor who is in control of his own budget.

That’s rare.

I left the story with him for a while, hoping he might change his mind and run it anyway, but now he’s given me a definitive no.

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https://www.matthewteller.com/2017/08/25/the-loneliest-island/#respondFri, 25 Aug 2017 14:48:13 +0000https://www.matthewteller.com/?p=2025I’m lucky to have visited one of the world’s most remote inhabited islands twice. Ascension lies in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between Africa and South America – and the only reason I’ve been there is because of its runway: if you’re flying from one side of the planet to another, Ascension is...

]]>I’m lucky to have visited one of the world’s most remote inhabited islands twice. Ascension lies in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between Africa and South America – and the only reason I’ve been there is because of its runway: if you’re flying from one side of the planet to another, Ascension is a strategic place to refuel, and both times I’ve visited I was flying between the Falkland Islands and Britain. That’s 8,000 miles, or 13,000 km, and the only plane that flies it is a slightly modified Airbus A330 chartered by Britain’s Ministry of Defence – mostly for military personnel, though with a few seats on each flight for civilians.

Last year I was flying back after visiting Antarctica, and stopped on Ascension to make a radio documentary for the BBC about the island’s unique conservation challenges. Click here for details.

This year I was returning after making a programme on the Falklands, and stopped on Ascension to write for the FT newspaper about the island’s potential for tourism – the first travel feature, I believe, about Ascension in a major media outlet anywhere in the world. (If I’m wrong and you know of another, please let me know in the comments section below.)

Since I was there, life on Ascension has changed utterly. The island’s only air link – which formerly ran twice a week to/from the UK – has been withdrawn by Britain’s Ministry of Defence, rendering Ascension virtually unreachable. (Details in the article.) A replacement flight, once a month to Johannesburg, has yet to materialise. Businesses have already closed, and more will follow in the months ahead. Long-term residents are leaving. The future is very uncertain.

Which makes the email I received from someone there, after having read my article, so touching. “One of the best articles I’ve read about Ascension,” they said. “Factually correct, and portraying the island the way so many of us love it.”

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https://www.matthewteller.com/2017/06/30/on-the-radio/#respondFri, 30 Jun 2017 17:02:49 +0000https://www.matthewteller.com/?p=2017I’m very excited – and incredibly lucky – to be doing more radio at the moment. As well as my penguin programmes for BBC Radio 4 recently, I’ve just finished making South America in the South Atlantic with Sparklab Productions, which is going out BBC World Service in August, Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent...

]]>I’m very excited – and incredibly lucky – to be doing more radio at the moment.

As well as my penguin programmes for BBC Radio 4 recently, I’ve just finished making South America in the South Atlantic with Sparklab Productions, which is going out BBC World Service in August, Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent recently accepted my story about the Falklands, hopefully airing soon, and I’m very proud to have been named as an ‘associate’ of Overtone Productions, through whom I’m helping the wonderful Bridget Minamore explore how poets who are women – and particularly women of colour – have made (and are making) their voices heard, also for Radio 4, airing in October.

]]>https://www.matthewteller.com/2017/06/30/on-the-radio/feed/0The penguins that wouldn’t explodehttps://www.matthewteller.com/2017/05/31/penguins-wouldnt-explode/
https://www.matthewteller.com/2017/05/31/penguins-wouldnt-explode/#respondWed, 31 May 2017 10:47:26 +0000https://www.matthewteller.com/?p=2010It all started with a random line spotted during a search for something else. “Penguins aren’t heavy enough to set off landmines,” it said, or thereabouts. Was that true? Yes, it was – or, at least, mostly true: anti-personnel mines need about 8kg of weight to set them off, and most penguin species don’t get...

]]>It all started with a random line spotted during a search for something else. “Penguins aren’t heavy enough to set off landmines,” it said, or thereabouts. Was that true?

Yes, it was – or, at least, mostly true: anti-personnel mines need about 8kg of weight to set them off, and most penguin species don’t get that heavy (kings and emperors do, but they didn’t matter for the story that transpired).

I was already going to the Falklands, commissioned by BBC World Service radio to make a documentary examining the often-overlooked links of history, culture and identity between the islands and the continent of South America. But more work would help make the trip pay.

The Falklands has penguins. It also has landmines. The combination sounded perfect. And the more I looked, the better the story got. Minefields in the Falklands – which I saw on my visit there last year – have all been fenced off since just after the 1982 war with Argentina. Many of them are on bleak, boggy land in the interior, but the sweeping white-sand oceanfront beaches around Stanley – formerly loved by locals for walks and picnics – were also mined.

In the intervening 35 years, sealed off from human (and animal) encroachment, there’s been remarkable restoration of natural habitats within the minefields. Flora has regrown. And down on the beaches the penguins – particularly the gentoos and the magellanics (both of which are lighter than 8kg!) – are thriving behind their barbed-wire fences.

But the UK has signed up to the international treaty banning landmines. We are under an obligation to clear mines from territory we control. Happy penguins or no, we must dig up the beaches and clear the mines.

What do the locals think? How are conservationists liaising with the mine-clearance teams? Doing potentially life-threatening work every day, do the deminers even care about the plants and the penguins?

This programme resulted, along with this article for BBC News – and, for good measure, Radio 4 also asked for this programme about how one Falklands couple manage to combine sheep-farming with penguin tours.

My World Service documentary about Falklands/South America culture is in the pipeline – more details soon.

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https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/12/07/cracks-in-the-ice/#commentsWed, 07 Dec 2016 11:32:18 +0000https://www.matthewteller.com/?p=2001So the big Antarctic news today (7 Dec 16) is all based on this press release put out yesterday by British Antarctic Survey, the government body coordinating the UK’s polar research, about their intention to move the Halley Research Station away from an expanding chasm in the ice shelf on which Halley sits. First, hats off to...

]]>So the big Antarctic news today (7 Dec 16) is all based on this press release put out yesterday by British Antarctic Survey, the government body coordinating the UK’s polar research, about their intention to move the Halley Research Station away from an expanding chasm in the ice shelf on which Halley sits.

First, hats off to BAS for keeping their story in the national conversation – from David Attenborough launching Boaty McBoatface to this sort of stuff in the Sun. The work they do is vital for all of us, and it’s right that it should get the widest possible airing.

The Guardian picked up on the release here. So did the Telegraph here, but regrettably with a badly worded, scare-mongering story, saying Halley is “in danger of falling into a huge chasm.” That might the case if Halley isn’t moved in the next few years – but it is being moved, so that danger is negligible, and it’s misleading to suggest otherwise. Also, the reporter says the modules will be shifted “on the back of” large tractors – they won’t: as BAS said, they’ll be towed – and then she confuses the story by adding in some unrelated stuff about cosmic dust.

Poor journalism and poor science from the Telegraph, to add to their ignominiously purple-prosed fail from last year: “It has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood disaster movie.” Huh.

First, the Halley move is not new news. It’s been known about for at least a year. New Scientist reported on it last December. I went to Halley in January & February this year as part of the first media team to visit since 1999, hosted by BAS to make a documentary for BBC Radio 4 with weather presenter Peter Gibbs. That was broadcast in March – and we covered the chasm issue then, talking to a glaciologist on site (audio from 15:14).

Peter also filed this piece for the BBC in May, including a TV news package about the chasm. And Peter’s Horizon on BBC2 in May featured the chasm story prominently.

So, again, hats off to BAS for keeping a year-old story in the headlines.

But fewer hats off to Britain’s science journalists for missing the significance of a crucial piece of new information, which – as so often in press releases – comes in the very last line:

In October 2016 a new crack emerged some 17km to the north of the research station across the route sometimes used to resupply Halley. This route will not now be used as alternative relief sites are available.

This is serious. This new crack cuts off the supply route to Halley from the docking point known as “N9”.

Other than small aircraft, the only way into Halley is by sea. But there is no infrastructure for docking. The edge of the ice shelf is mostly cliffs – too high and unstable to scale. In a few places, the cliffs are low enough that ships can nudge up alongside, carving out their own docking-place to allow transfer of cargo onto the ice surface, for moving by Snocat to Halley itself many miles inland.

Since its founding sixty years ago, Halley has had two access points: “N9”, where the ice shelf comes right down almost to sea level, enabling access, and the “Creeks”, where gaps between fingers of ice cliff are filled by compacted snow-ramps, easing access to the ice surface.

Which to choose is down to the skill of the ship’s captain at the time – gauging reports of sea ice conditions in the area, monitoring radar and satellite or drone imagery, years of personal experience in the ice…

N9 is often easier to reach – it’s further north, and the swirl of sea ice in the Weddell Sea, which creates clear “leads” along the shore, can keep it relatively ice-free, compared to the Creeks. But N9 is further from Halley, meaning more time, resources and – as always in Antarctica – risk in the transfer of people and cargo from ship to base.

When I arrived, in late January 2016, sea ice was light. N9 was clear. We didn’t even go near the Creeks. This is N9, in the picture I took.

But now, BAS is saying that N9 is no longer usable because a crack has opened in the last few weeks between there and Halley.

For the ship captains, it looks like it’s now the Creeks, or nothing. And if the Creeks are inaccessible – because of dense sea ice, or bad weather, or some other factor – then the ship can’t get in at all. And that will seriously threaten the chances for successful execution of this phase of the relocation, in the short time window before winter sets in.

BAS will be worried.

The emergence of this new crack must also be raising questions about the stability of the ice shelf as a whole – hinted at in BAS’s overlooked, ever-so-bland line “Glaciologists are monitoring routes closely.” Long-dormant cracks in the shelf are not only coming to life, but expanding rapidly, downwards to the sea surface and lengthways to the coast in both directions. New ones are appearing, cutting off long-used access routes. It’s not a “Hollywood disaster movie”, as per Telegraph, but it must be exercising minds. Predicting movement of ice shelves is like predicting earthquakes – desperately difficult, and the closest we can realistically get is educated guesswork. Often in Antarctica it’s a scientific exercise with no short-term impact. But in this case, the lives of the people at Halley – and lots of British taxpayers’ money – depend on the scientists’ figuring out what, if anything, is going on with Brunt Ice Shelf all of a sudden. (Though that “sudden” needs scare quotes…)

That’s another reason why that innocuous last line of BAS’s matters. All of this is unforeseen expense. As BAS has successfully driven home to the media, Halley VI was designed to move – but nothing I’ve read so far has pointed out that it wasn’t intended to be moved this soon. Halley VI has only been in location and operational since February 2013. Shutting everything down and moving it, less than 4 years later, wasn’t in the original plan. That was forced on BAS by the long-dormant chasm “suddenly” starting to expand in 2013. (That was unlucky: had the crack been seen to expand a couple of years earlier, Halley VI might not have been sited where it was.)

And what is the cost of moving it? That hasn’t been made public, but it’s safe to assume it’s several tens of millions of pounds.

There was more expense – and more uncertainty – in July 2014, when Halley’s power failed in the middle of winter, shutting down life-support systems, endangering the on-site crew, and necessitating costly repairs in the months thereafter.

And now this new crack cutting off access via N9 threatens yet more expense if ships can’t, for whatever reason, use the Creeks.

Marry that up with the massive changes afoot in BAS. Amid the fanfare about Boaty and the new Attenborough ship, the reality is that BAS’s logistical and science operation will in 2019 (or shortly thereafter) be going down from two ships at present, to one. Can one ship do the work of two? What are the operational adjustments required for supply and cargo transfer – and will the science still get done? Nobody is quite sure just yet. Scroll down this BBC page to listen to BAS’s director Jane Francis discuss that problem in detail.

With all that in mind, as I said at the beginning, hats off to BAS – both for the incredible work they do, and for the brilliant messaging they deliver to the media about that work.

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https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/11/23/talking-to-people/#respondWed, 23 Nov 2016 18:18:14 +0000https://www.matthewteller.com/?p=1992I’m very happy to have given two talks in the last few days, both in my home town, Banbury. The first was an “Antarctic Evening”. Soon after I got home from my trip to Antarctica earlier this year with the BBC weather presenter Peter Gibbs, a local friend – community organiser Steve Gold – suggested...

]]>I’m very happy to have given two talks in the last few days, both in my home town, Banbury.

The first was an “Antarctic Evening”. Soon after I got home from my trip to Antarctica earlier this year with the BBC weather presenter Peter Gibbs, a local friend – community organiser Steve Gold – suggested people might be interested to hear about my experiences. Would I do a talk? Maybe for the local young homeless charity BYHP? I agreed, then Peter agreed, and Steve and the tireless Tim Tarby-Donald of BYHP took over organising venue hire and ticket sales and a raffle. Last week Peter and I spoke to 170+ people in the Town Hall. It was standing room only.

What a thrill, talking to a receptive audience about Antarctica. Rather emotional, actually.

I talked about ways we might be able to understand what Shackleton meant, when he wrote – after his safe return from Antarctica – “We had pierced the veneer of outside things.” And I’m afraid I also quoted myself, because I’m proud of the blog post I wrote in my cabin on the ship heading south – click here to read it.

Peter’s talk, after mine, was brilliant, mixing personal reminiscences of his posting to Halley in the 1980s and his emotions on returning this year with explanations of some of the science being done there today, using animations and video clips. Few people can explain why Antarctica matters for global research and climate science better than Peter. It was a pleasure to listen.

And he also played a breathtaking short video made by BBC polar camera specialist David Baillie, who was with us on the journey south, filming for the Horizon programme, aided by expert sound recordist Doug Dreger. View it here. It’ll knock your socks off. It held the hall transfixed.

Later, BYHP said the evening raised the largest amount they’d ever made in a single event. Which made me even happier.

Then a few days ago I spoke at Banbury’s Literary Live festival, talking about changes in travel writing over the last couple of decades, some of the places I’ve been – including Antarctica! – and some of the challenges now facing journalists, media and publishing.

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https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/11/17/relaunch-day/#respondThu, 17 Nov 2016 10:45:49 +0000http://www.matthewteller.com/?p=1976I’ve been waiting almost a year for this. Today’s the day I relaunch matthewteller.com, with a much-needed new design by the brilliant, patient and all-round excellent Tom Hole, who runs his own design studio named Stirtingale. The delays – and the lack of momentum on this blog over 2016 – are all down to me: first I...

Today’s the day I relaunch matthewteller.com, with a much-needed new design by the brilliant, patient and all-round excellent Tom Hole, who runs his own design studio named Stirtingale.

The delays – and the lack of momentum on this blog over 2016 – are all down to me: first I was away on a long trip to Antarctica, via South Africa, the Falklands and Ascension Island (that blurry hand pic is me on one of Ascension’s beaches), which punched a big hole in redesign planning. The motivation during and after that to keep updating two crappy sites that I knew weren’t right – website and blog, then hosted separately under its own URL – was flagging. That Antarctic trip led me to rethink lots of things in the first half of the year. Progressive political failures and resurgent right-wingery did the same from June onwards. I lost heart in social media and the online life, and that included feeding my blog.

Tom stayed with it, pushing things on bit by bit. I’m glad he did. If you like the way this site now looks, it’s all down to him.

(If you don’t, please tell me why in the comments below.)

Also, the world has changed utterly in the last six months. From a point where social media had become stifling and counter-productive to informed debate, we’re now in a place where I suspect social media – or some form of online organising – is going to become increasingly important, and desirable, in the years ahead. I’m happy to be blogging again.

How did I find Tom? Last December, while I was contacting a lot of designers about a site revamp, I read something by journalist Christopher Lord. I hadn’t heard his name before, so googled it, then went to look at his website. The design wasn’t right for me, but something chimed. The copyright line at the bottom said “Site design tjhole”. So I found tjhole and tweeted him. He followed up with a sharp, detailed email. Yes, I thought.

]]>https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/11/17/relaunch-day/feed/0I flew / In my dreamhttps://www.matthewteller.com/2016/11/16/i-flew-dream/
https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/11/16/i-flew-dream/#respondWed, 16 Nov 2016 15:11:04 +0000http://www.matthewteller.com/?p=1958I flew In my dream Striding through the night fields My pliable legs grew to spindles And I left the pursuers and their furrows And I watched myself, beside myself, with my spindled legs below Striding through the night fields And then “Forget the legs” And they retracted As I flew In my...

]]>https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/11/16/i-flew-dream/feed/0Movies on a shiphttps://www.matthewteller.com/2016/01/17/movies-on-a-ship/
https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/01/17/movies-on-a-ship/#commentsSun, 17 Jan 2016 13:34:40 +0000http://quitealone.com/?p=1457I never liked that whole thing of bringing your music along. It can be funny, listening to James Brown while driving through the Jordanian desert, but I always thought it was a con. You’re just giving yourself a bogus lifeline in the turmoil of travel, setting one movie in your head against another, like they’re...

I never liked that whole thing of bringing your music along. It can be funny, listening to James Brown while driving through the Jordanian desert, but I always thought it was a con. You’re just giving yourself a bogus lifeline in the turmoil of travel, setting one movie in your head against another, like they’re real. Better to feel the dislocation. Let the ideas of the place you’re in infiltrate.

Our ship left Cape Town yesterday, bound for the British Antarctic Survey’s research station Halley, where I’m making a radio programme. Until we get there, in two weeks’ time, there’s not much to do. Lying on my bunk yesterday evening, as the ship rolls and pitches in a Force 7 gale, I tap on Nigel Kennedy’s Four Seasons.

I’ve loved it ever since I heard it as a teenager in the 80s. It’s a shouty, teenage thing, Kennedy self-consciously shoving a firecracker up the backside of Vivaldi as phone-hold music, screeching and sawing as he drives it all onwards. No hanging about. He’s trying to reclaim ground once thought lost to older, wiser heads.

Unexpectedly, the screechings help me see more clearly, like the Blue Danube in Kubrick’s 2001.

Antarctica is absence. Absence from loved ones, gaps in children’s lives. It is darkless, then lightless. It has no colour, no water, no people. No smell. It is rock, unyielding, or touchless powder. Comfort is there, but not of this world. It has no stories – or, rather, its stories are silent to us, played out in geology and atmospheric chemistry and indifferent forces of magnetism.

In other wildernesses you tread through people’s lives. The Sahara is a human place. Notwithstanding the bleak poetics of outsiders, purportedly empty Arabia rings with humanity. Arizona and Australia and the Gobi and Siberia have always nurtured human purpose.

But not Antarctica. The Greeks and the Romans guessed at the existence of some southern continent – it had to be there, they reasoned, to balance the great lumps of land they knew about in the north. Books have been written about the idea of Antarctica as an unknowable, unreachable presence at the farthest edge of consciousness.

And it’s only in the last fifty-odd years that visiting Antarctica has become anything like routine – for science chiefly, though there is tourism, now, too. It’s like the oldest country in the world, and the newest. But nobody owns it. It is unclaimable territory, with no permanent population, No person lives there who could reclaim the place from the bearded ghost-explorers of the Heroic Age, a hundred years ago. The names of their imperial benefactors live on unchallenged, in the capes and the coasts and the ice shelves.

Like a teenager, I want to scribble them out sometimes, and write in my own.

Shadows lie long in Antarctica. Men go there, predominantly. White men, overwhelmingly. Former colonisers and the once-colonised are just starting to jockey for position there. Perhaps, I think on my bunk as Kennedy screeches, it, too, could do with a few firecrackers. What do we want this place far away to be? What are the movies it should play in our heads?

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https://www.matthewteller.com/2016/01/08/south/#commentsFri, 08 Jan 2016 09:30:02 +0000http://quitealone.com/?p=1323On 13th January 2016 I’m due to fly from London to Cape Town, alongside a BBC TV crew and BBC presenter Peter Gibbs. There we’ll join the RRS (Royal Research Ship) Ernest Shackleton, for a two-week voyage south across 2,500 miles of the roughest seas in the world, to reach the British Antarctic research station Halley in the...

]]>On 13th January 2016 I’m due to fly from London to Cape Town, alongside a BBC TV crew and BBC presenter Peter Gibbs. There we’ll join the RRS (Royal Research Ship) Ernest Shackleton, for a two-week voyage south across 2,500 miles of the roughest seas in the world, to reach the British Antarctic research station Halley in the last week of January.

After a couple of days there, we board an RAF charter flight from the Falklands to Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic near the Equator. The TV crew fly straight on to Britain, but Peter and I disembark for a few days. From Ascension we fly on to the UK, due to touch down at RAF Brize Norton about breakfast time on 24th February.

I’m producing two documentaries for BBC Radio 4, both presented by Peter Gibbs – one on Halley (Peter’s return there after 35 years, the journey, the location, the science), the other on Ascension Island (its unique ecosystem, conservation issues around the introduction of invasive species). There’ll be more radio from the Falklands, blogs and features, and – bandwidth permitting – I’m hoping to be able to tweet and send short videos for social media throughout the trip. TV is there to film a separate, full-length science documentary, also presented by Peter.

But there can’t be any guarantees. I may be off-grid for the whole six weeks. The sea ice might slow us down – or, perhaps, trap us for a few hours. Or days. Or longer, if we’re unlucky. Impossible to predict.

You could try following me on Snapchat @matthewteller – I’ll do my best to upload snaps & stories. Instagram? If I can.

Antarctica is absence. Absence from loved ones, silence in children’s lives. It is darkless, then lightless. It has no colour, no water, no people. No smell. It is rock, unyielding, or touchless powder. Comfort is there, but not of this world. I have, almost literally, no idea what’s going to happen.